Fire Hazard

Where there’s smoke, there’s pollution. How can airport firefighters green it up?

For most airport firefighters, the gritty, grueling kind of work—the kind they love—comes just once a year, courtesy of the Federal Aviation Administration. On those days, firefighters can ditch the weight training schedule, shrug off a zillion disaster management PowerPoints, and get to the good stuff: turning an actual hose against an actual flame.

The FAA requires all airport firefighters to train in at least one “live fire” exercise every 12 months. But even those rare training days have been affected by environmental regulations. Government agencies at all levels have ordered live-fire training facilities to be retrofitted—or torn down and constructed anew—with filters to keep both the fuels that produce practice fires and the agents that extinguish them from leeching into the ground.

Fire departments have replaced Halon, a favorite firefighting agent but an ozone-eating monster, with a more ecologically friendly foam called Halotron. And cheap, smoky fossil fuels like Jet A, widely burned in live-fire practice pits, are being dumped for less polluting alternatives—one in particular. Liquid propane is frequently substituted for jet fuel because it’s cheap and burns without emitting pollutants. Still, most firefighters don’t care for it.

“It lacks the realism,” says Master Sergeant Kevin Matlock, fire chief at Washington state’s McChord Air Force Base, where he trains enlistees. “We’ve got a lot of young firefighters who don’t know how hydrocarbon fuels react, that don’t know that the fire will burn back on you,” he explains.

Unlike jet fuel, propane smokes only if it is burned too lean (with too little oxygen) or too rich. Because it combusts at a much lower temperature than a complex hydrocarbon fuel, it throws off much less heat. Propane fires also burn less chaotically than jet fuel blazes.
“Jet fuel is really unique because it rolls and has fireballs—it’s almost got a mind of its own,” says Bill Hutfilz, the training officer for Clark County Fire Department at Las Vegas McCarran International Airport and vice chairman of an airport firefighters’ group devoted to industry education. “Propane doesn’t. Hydrocarbon burns a lot blacker and it runs and hides. It’s going to get in the cracks in the airplane or cracks in the concrete. Wherever that fuel is, that fire is going to follow.”

Despite the trend toward propane, many FAA-approved firefighter training facilities still burn fossil fuels. But a few have managed to strike a balance between environmental stewardship and the realism of jet fuel without turning to propane. The regional facility at Boston Logan International is among them.

In 2005, Paul Callinan, the airport’s assistant chief for training, oversaw his department’s shift to Tekflame, a hydrocarbon that has been scrubbed of an additive that makes jet fuel burn evenly. The additive, Benzene, also causes much of the smoke that comes from burning fuel.

“I feel that our facility, using Tekflame as the fuel, gives a far more realistic attitude and environment than it would by using propane,” says Callinan. But, he adds, “it’s very, very expensive—double the cost, if not more, of regular fuel. Eight dollars a gallon, compared to the $2.90 a gallon we used to pay for jet fuel.”

Few airports have live-burn facilities, and sending firefighters off-site for training—either with hydrocarbon or propane—is not cheap. During a training exercise, a larger airport fire department may burn as much as 10,000 gallons of fuel. Tack on the price of water, firefighting foam and chemicals, facility use fees, and transportation, and costs can approach $100,000.

Because live-fire training is so expensive, and because so few airports have burn pits, some airport firefighting departments have developed other ways to keep skills sharp between mandated live burns.